Cronin, Blaise. 2001. “Hyperauthorship: A Postmodern Perversion or Evidence of a Structural Shift in Scholarly Communication Practices?” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 52 (7): 558–69. doi:10.1002/asi.1097.

This is a really important paper that anticipates a lot of the arguments I made in my 2013 Force11 talk.

It discusses a history of what authorship means, glances at the idea that the use of "authorship fetishes writing, discusses how other schemes have made contribution much more important, and concludes with a discussion of differences between High Energy Physics and Biomedicine.

Argues in the end weakly for a contributor model for those fields in which authorship can no longer capture the value of the cognitive labour involved in science.

ome kind of ontolog-ical reassessment of authorship is called for to ensure thatauthority, credit, and accountability, currently apportionedin confused fashion across authors, acknowledgees and con-tributors, are henceforth distributed appropriately, parsimo-niously, and unambiguously. I

what is implied by a byline in thesecases is typically a very precise, often specialized input to acomplex, multidisciplinary project. The classical idea ofauthorship cannot credibly accommodate the legions ofcoworkers associated with large-scale collaboration, nor canit adequately reflect “the epistemic role of support person-nel” in the conduct of science (Shapin, 1995, p. 359).

day’sbiomedical journal article is the progeny of occasionallymassive collaborations, the individual members of whichmay have minimal involvement in the fashioning of theliterary end-product itself, with the act of writing beingdelegated to a subgroup or designated spokespersons. I

However, a diverse body of work on thesocially situated nature of scientific communication alreadyexists which points the way. This ranges from Crane’s(1969) pioneering analyses of invisible colleges throughLatour and Woolgar’s (1979) classic study of laboratory lifeat the Salk Institute to Traweek’s (1992) richly texturedethnography of the HEP community. In addition, the workof Schatz and colleagues on the Worm Community Systemproject, which was designed to capture the full range ofknowledge, formal and informal, of the community of mo-lecular biologists who study the nematode worm C. elegans(see: http://www.canis.uiuc.edu/projects/wcs/index.html)can provide useful insights; so, too, research into the mate-rial practices and social interactions of scientists working incollaboratories, such as the Upper Atmospheric ResearchCollaboratory (see: http://intel.si.umich.edu/crew/Research/resrch08.htm) or the Space, Physics & Aeronomy ResearchCollaboratory (see: http://intel.si.umich.edu/sparc/) at theUniversity of Michigan

is wiseto avoid generalizations and to concentrate instead on show-ing how interactions between coworkers, specifically theorchestration of information exchange and coauthorship, aregrounded in local culture.

"it is wise to avoid generalizations and to concentrate instead on showing how interactions between coworkers, specifically the orchestration of information exchange and coauthorship, are grounded in local culture."

TheHEP research community is thus characterized by highlevels of internal scrutiny, mutual trust—witness, for in-stance, the institutionalized practice of relying upon, andciting, preprints—and peer tracking, such that it is notsusceptible to systematic fraud. Contrary

physicists live in a very trustful, observant, world; also they do a lot of internal, pre-referee, review

The answer probably has to do with the relative intensityof socialization and oral communication (Traweek, 1992,pp. 120 –123), along with the character of the organizationalstructures and value systems, which define collaborations inlarge-scale, high-energy physics and biomedical research.

Why is there less soul-searching about hyper-authorship in HEP? disciplinary differences

ights (1, 3, 5) are summed to(a) estimate each individual’s overall contribution, whichcan range from 1–35 (735 being the maximum possiblescore), and (b) determine the sequence in which coauthors’names are listed on the resultant publication.

owever, it isimportant to distinguish between generic job categories andthe specification of tasks performed; the contributorshipmodel is designed to record each individual’s actual input(e.g., experimental design, data collection, statistical analy-sis, final article revision), not job title (e.g., coprincipalinvestigator, technician, systems analyst), since the lattermay on occasion mask or inflate the former (Stern, 2000).

Great point about movie credits: they are about job title, not contribution.

The standard model accepts that authorship is linkedinextricably to writing. But writing is no longer a necessarycondition of coauthorship in certain cases. Thus, an alter-native to authorship is required to accommodate the manyother contributions that shape the published byproducts ofcollaborative activity, be they research reports, journal ar-ticles, conference papers, or technical reports. C

standard model ties authorship to writing, but writing is no longer a crucial condition of coauthorship

To date, more than 500 journals have adopted theICMJE’s (1997) principles of authorship as laid out in the5th edition of theUniform Requirements for ManuscriptsSubmitted to Biomedical Journals(Klein, 1999; Stern,2000). According to these concrete guidelines, candidateauthors must satisfy three conditions. They must make:“. . . substantial contributions to (a) conception and design,or analysis and interpretation of data; and to (b) drafting thearticle or revising it critically for important intellectualcontent; and on (c) final approval of the version to bepublished.” Laudable though these guidelines are, it is un-likely that they will solve the problem. A study by Hoen etal. (1998) in the Netherlands found that authors and theircoauthors did not always agree with one another’s assess-ments that the ICMJE criteria had been met. In the UK,Bhopal et al.’s (1997) survey of medical researchers dis-covered that, although most respondents concurred with thethree criteria (more than 80% in each case), a majority(62%) did not feel that all three conditions should have to besatisfied to warrant author status. F

Rennie, Yank, andEmanuel (1997) that the distinction between the two modesof credit allocation is inherently artificial. Consequently,they have argued for explicit description of all individualcontributions as a means of eliminating ambiguity. Such aproposal would remove both authorship and acknowledg-ment from the frame, a really quite significant break withscholarly publishing tradition. This alternative amounts to aradical model of authorship attribution in contrast to thestandard model

Rennie, Yank, and Emanuel 1997 argue that acknowledgements and authorship can't be disentangled.

he problem with arbitrary capping, whetherof authors or acknowledgees of one kind or another, is thatsome individuals’ potentially important contributions, bethey clinical investigators (Carbone, 1992) or telescopeoperators (Cronin, 1995), may be erased. This could, con-ceivably, have negative downstream implications in termsof remuneration and promotion prospects for those—the“invisible technicians” (Shapin, 1995, p. 355)—whose ef-forts have been withheld from the public ledger. It mightalso reduce, in line with theories of reciprocal altruism(Nowak & Sigmund, 2000), potential collaborators’ will-ingness to ‘donate’ their services.

Kassirer and Angell (1991, p. 1511)of theNew England Journal of Medicinewere bemoaningnot only “ambiguous authorship” but “lengthy acknowledg-ments,” inflated by the inclusion of “everybody who hadanything to do with the study, including those who weremerely carrying out their jobs, such as technicians.”

Bazerman (1984, 1988) has chronicled the evolutionof the acknowledgment during the 19th and 20th centuriesin the journal literature of experimental physics, showinghow it became, to paraphrase Grafton (1997, p. 233), anintegral part of the rhetoric of narration and annotation

twe should not assume too much in terms of common un-derstandings: the dividing line between the two classifica-tions, author and acknowledgee, is neither universally ap-preciated nor consistently applied. Cronin (1995, pp. 85–86), for instance, has shown that interpretative disputes arenot uncommon, and that some researchers feel that theyhave been denied their just deserts by being downgradedfrom coauthor to acknowledgee. A

ut before considering theICMJE’s guidelines for authorship, it may be instructive toreflect on the role of acknowledgments in the primarycommunication process, and the relationship between au-thorship and acknowledgment.

In rare cases, a questionable, published paper may acquire“orphan” status (Rennie & Flanagin, 1994, p. 469), as allconcerned try to wash their hands of it, invoking hyperlaborspecialization as grounds for exoneration. Such a scenario isinconceivable under the standard model, where authorshipand accountability are isomorphic. But when authorship/ownership of a study is distributed across multiple contrib-utors, many of whom may have zero or weak relation-ships—whether personal or institutional—with their myriadcoworkers (Katz & Martin, 1997), the practical (i.e., en-forceable) allocation of accountability may pose intractableproblems

orphan papers: where everybody washes hand of poor results by saying it wasn't their specialisation. [[Why is this a problem, actually? The point is that we catch fraudulent or wrong papers, not that we have somebody to blame.

Additionally, Ducor (2000) investigated asmall set of patents in molecular biology and their concom-itant publications in the scientific literature. Of the 40patent-article pairs examined, all but two listed more au-thors than inventors, which raises interesting questionsabout the relative stringency of the criteria employed forconferring authorship and inventorship.

number of patent holders is generally smaller than number of authors on accompanying paper

Slone (1996), in a survey of “major research” articlespublished in theAmerican Journal of Roentgenology, foundthat undeserved coauthorship rose from 9% on papers withthree coauthors to 30% on papers with more than six coau-thors.

Flanagin et al.(1998) developed a multivariate logistic regression model totest the hypothesis that coauthored articles (operationalizedas papers with six or more authors) were increasing at a rategreater than would be expected when confounding vari-ables, such as the number of centers, were taken into ac-count. They found that 19% of original research reports hadhonorific authors, individuals who were garnering phantomfodder for their curricula vitae. They also discovered that11% of articles had ghost authors, which means that quite afew individuals were not receiving due credit for theircreative or material contributions to the research process—“the ghostly inferred hosts of unnamed actors who shiftedinstruments about and exerted their muscular labor’(Shapin, 1995, p. 379). Their findings, based on surveys ofcorresponding authors, are in keeping with other estimatesof honorific authorship in the biomedical literature.

norificauthorship and data integrity, seem to be of especial concernto the biomedical community, given widespread media cov-erage of, and speculation about, fraudulent practice, theeffects of which, in both career and personal terms, can bedevastating (e.g., Kevles, 1998).

ow, for instance, should a promotion andtenure committee view the contribution of the 99th listedauthor on a particle physics paper or the 36th author on agenome sequencing study? What may seem to constitute aminiscule portion of a single journal article may, in fact,have consumed a significant amount of that individual’sprofessional time and energy. T

Under the standard model, the rights and responsibilitiesof authorship are clearly apprehended by all parties: authors,editors, referees, and readers. In appending my name to thisarticle I am nailing my colors to mast; if the article attractscritical approval, is discussed, quoted, and, in due course,cited in the scholarly literature, I shall be happy to bank thesymbolic capital which accrues to me as author and origi-nator. If the paper is challenged because of exiguity oftheoretical, historical, or empirical heft, I shall simply haveto face the music: there are no coauthors to help deflectcriticism. Likewise, if I am challenged for drawing toosparingly, selectively, or generously on the ideas and workof others, I understand the possible consequences. However,I have chosen not to hide behind the cloak of anonymity, orbypass the rigors of peer review by posting a version of thispaper on my Web site; rather, I want to publicize my ideasamong my peers, and the best way to do that, and signify mytrustworthiness, is to pursue publication in an accreditedforum. As a serial author, I am fully cognizant of the rightsand responsibilities of authorship. I understand the norms ofscholarly publishing, and I am aware of the sanctions thatmay be invoked if infractions occur. Should the argumentsin this paper prove flawed, no one but myself is to blame,and that includes those whom I have named in the acknowl-edgments section. If the paper attracts attention, I shall behappy to bask in the glow.

Great discussion of why scientists/scholars author and what they accept and risk as a result

e need toconsider how multiple authorship, in extremis—what I havechosen to term ‘hyperauthorship’— undermines commonlyheld assumptions about the nature and ethical entailments ofauthorship, and how, in exceptional cases, it can lead tofundamental questions about the integrity of the researchcommunity as a whole. Unfortunately, little effort is madein the biomedical literature to distinguish systematicallybetween what might be termed acceptable levels of multipleauthorship and unacceptable levels of hyperauthorship.Studies of coauthorship trends, as will become clear,

makes distinction between "acceptable levels of multiple authorship and unacceptable levels of hyperauthorship.

n the realm of periodical publications,the sovereignty of the standard model is being most hotlycontested in biomedical research fields, where intense levelsof professional collaboration and coauthorship are common-place (Croll, 1984; Rennie & Flanagin, 1994; Rennie, Yank,& Emanuel, 1997; Rennie & Yank, 1998; King, 2000).Proposals for reform, which seek to retire the concept ofauthorship and replace it with a scheme for the allocation ofspecific, task- or job-related credits (e.g., Squires, 1996;Smith, 1997) are not only being debated by editors andothers, but are being adopted by leading scientific journal

On how credit and authorship is being debated in medical publishing (with bibliography)

0authors—a leading indicator of hyperauthorship?—in-creased from 1 in 1981 to 182 in 1994 (McDonald, 1995)and that the average number of authors per paper in theScience Citation Index (SCI)increased from 1.83 in 1955 to3.9 in 1999 (personal communication with Helen Atkins,Director of Database Development, Institute for ScientificInformation, Philadelphia, 2000). To use a couple of ran-dom examples: a 1997 article inNature(cited almost 600times since then) on the genome sequence of a bacteriumhas 151 coauthors, drawn from dozens of research labora-tories scattered across twelve countries (Kunst et al., 1997).A recent (Daily et al., 2000). two-page article inScienceonthe economic value of ecosystems has no fewer than 17authors and five acknowledgees. I

s not still common prac-tice in fields such as philosophy or women’s studies (Cro-nin, Davenport, & Martinson, 1997). By way of example,Endersby (1996) has analyzed trends in, and reasons for,collaboration and multiple authorship in the social sciences.Patel (1973) has described the growth of coauthorship insociological journals for the period 1895 to 1965. Bird(1997) has found evidence of coauthorship growth in theliterature of marine mammal science (1985–1993), whileKoehler et al. (1999) found that the average number ofauthors per article in theJournal of the American Society forInformation Science(previouslyAmerican Documentation)rose from approximately 1.2 in the 1950s to 1.8 in the1990s

n a sample of 2,101 scientificpapers published between 1665 and 1800, Beaver andRosen found that 2.2% described collaborative work. No-table was the degree of joint authorship in astronomy,especially in situations where scientists were dependentupon observational data.

French science was much more profession-alized and institutionalized than was the case in either of theother European powers. Specifically, they found that morethan half of all the coauthored scientific articles in theirhistoric sample had been produced by French scientists.

in 18th and 19th C french scientists were more professional and half of all coauthored science papers had been produced by french scientists

iking increase inrates of coauthorship, though the latter is only a partialindicator of the former: coauthorship and collaboration arenot coextensive (Katz & Martin, 1997, p. 1). This trend ismost noticeable in experimental high-energy physics(HEP), with its often very large teams and highly sophisti-cated collaborations (Kling & McKim, 2000). A similartrend, dating from the 1990s, can be seen in the biomedicalresearch literature, particularly with regard to publicationsarising from large, multi-institutional clinical trials (Rennie,Yank, & Emanuel, 1997; Horton, 1998). H

In some domains, path-breaking work is nec-essarily the outcome of collaborative activity rather thanindividualistic scholarship, a fact reflected in the modestproportion of federal research funds which is allocated toindividual investigators rather than teams. Collaborationsare a necessary feature of much, though by no means all,contemporary scientific research.

in some domains, collaboration is necessary. Hence the preference for team grants

o some extent, authorship has becomea collective activity, with numerous coauthors competingfor the byline, some of whom may not have written, strictlyspeaking, a single word of the associated work (McDonald,1995; Kassirer & Angell, 1991).

extent to which authors may not have written a word in science (with bibliography)

n general terms, the lone authorstereotype ignores the fact that a great deal of the scholarlyliterature is the product of a “socio-technical production andcommunications network” (Kling, McKim, Fortuna, &King, 1999),

A great deal of scientific production is the product of a "socio-technical production and communications network"

The standard model of scholarly publishing assumes awork written by an author. There is typically a single authorwho receives full credit for theopusin question. By thesame token, the named author is held accountable for allclaims made in the text, excluding those attributed to othersvia citations. The appropriation of credit and allocation ofresponsibility thus go hand-in-hand, which makes for fairlystraightforward social accounting. The ethically informed,lone scholar has long been a popular figure, in both fact andscholarly mythology. Historically, authorship has beenviewed as a solitary profession, such that “when we picturewriting we see a solitary writer” (Brodkey, 1987, p. 55). Butthat model, as Price (1963) recognized almost three decadesago, is anachronistic as far as the great majority of contem-porary scientific, and much social scientific and humanistic,publishing is concerned.

On "standard model" of authorship: lone authority and responsibility; how this is anachronistic.

As Katzen (1980, p. 191) notes in heranalysis of early volumes of thePhilosophical Transac-tions:. . . no attempt is made to give prominence to the author ofthe article . . . there is generally no reference at all to theauthor in the heading that signals a new communication. Ifthe author is referred to in the title, it is likely to be in anoblique form . . . we are at the threshold between anony-mous and eponymous authorship

much has changedin terms of the ways, both instrumental and stylistic, inwhich scientists communicate the results of their research totheir peer communities. However, in the intervening 300-plus years, certain symbolic and rhetorical practices, nota-bly the assertion and defense of authorship, and all thepresumptive rights associated therewith, have remainedcenter stage. In the 17th century, the business of authorship,as the business of science itself, was much less complicatedand contentious than today—which is not to say that prioritydisputes were unheard of, that egos were never bruised, orthat “the bauble fame” did not come into play in earliertimes.

Although a lot has changed, "certain symbolic and rhetorical practices, notably the assertion and defence of authorship, and all the presumptive rights associated therewith, have remained center stage.

"extent to which deviant publishing practices in biomedical publishing are a function of sociocognitive and structural characteris-tics of the discipline by comparing biomedicine with high energy physics, the only other field which appears to exhibit comparable hyperauthorship tendencies"

Assess extent to which biomedical trends may foreshadow trends in other fields.

Annotators

First of all, we can say that today's writing has freed itself from the theme of expression. Referring only to itself; but without being restricted to the confines of its interiority, writing is identified with its own unfolded exteriority. This means that it is an interplay of signs arranged less according to its signified content than according to the very nature of the signifier. Writing unfolds like a game [jeu] that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.